Architect Sir Osborn McCutcheon, second from right, with a model of ICI House.
Photograph: BSM

In a land boasting more skyscrapers per capita than any other country, Australians today would be pardoned for missing their first, a quarter the height of what’s now the tallest. Yet no building has exerted such influence on Australian cityscapes as Orica House on Melbourne’s Eastern Hill – its everyday inconspicuousness attests to the ubiquity of the form it pioneered.

Stand closer to what was originally ICI House and the view changes. “I tell people I’m showing round that this was the iPhone of Australian architecture,” says Tim Leslie, a studio director at Bates Smart McCutcheon (BSM), which not only designed the building but, in a form of architectural ancestor worship, have since made it their headquarters. “It was so different to everything that had gone before.”

As Graeme Davison, author of City Dreamers,a new history of the Australian urban imagination, puts it: “In one bold leap, Melbourne threw off its Victorian dowdiness and became the most self-consciously modern Australian city.” In the spirit of the 1956 Olympic Games and the advent of television, the International Style of ICI House married the cosmopolitan and the technological in exciting and optimistic proportions. In its wake, buildings soared.

I tell people this was the iPhone of Australian architecture

Tim Leslie

Yet death and disaster also intruded. And not all the changes the building presaged were welcome. Aesthetic returns were to diminish swiftly: within a decade of ICI House’s slim, glassy elegance, the Gas & Fuel Corporation had inflicted on Melbourne not one but two hunched brown brick towers with tiny aluminium windows, proverbial in their monotony – the so-called ‘ugly sisters’.

And by his death in 1983, ICI House’s architect, Sir Osborn McCutcheon, had lost a good deal of his faith in industrial civilisation, and architecture’s place in it. “What would Os think of us today?” asks his son Andrew. “He would be aghast that property development has become such a major force in individual wealth creation. He saw planning land use as a stewardship of the land in the community interest … We seem to have to reinvent the wheel in every generation. History is not all a story of progress.”

Orica House on Melbourne’s Eastern Hill as it looks today. Photograph: David Collopy/Photofit

A slow start

At Andrew McCutcheon’s breakfast table in St Kilda poring over his father’s early sketches, recently discovered in BSM’s archives, we’re a world away from the turbocapitalism of modern development. There was no degree course when Osborn McCutcheon felt drawn to architecture – one designed one’s own. His family was not rich but comfortable, part of the tight circle of respectable Methodist Melbourne – he would later marry his first cousin. He worked in practices in San Francisco and London, and the immaculate line drawings of cathedrals and cottages, wells and windows, were the fruits of a year’s wandering in Europe in 1925. For his first few years at the firm Bates & Peebles, where he had earlier been articled, McCutcheon had a negative income, subsisting on borrowings.

That may partly explain the eventual panache of ICI House, its pent-up fullness with ideas. What with Depression and War, there were more bad years than good in McCutcheon’s first two decades’ practice. He designed a number of celebrated Melbourne buildings, including the striped classical AMP Society headquarters (1932), the vivacious Jazz-Moderne Buckley & Nunn men’s store (1933), and the Moderne–classical Second Church of Christ, Scientist, in Camberwell (1937). But much of his work was domestic – commissions for houses from Melbourne’s well-to-do. More formative were probably two and a half hectic years spent with the American military.

The building swayed slightly. In the fish tank on the executive floor … the water lapped gently from side to side

When the US Army Corps of Engineers (Southwest Pacific Area) was established in February 1942, McCutcheon was recruited to head an architectural section which churned out hundreds of designs for military buildings – huts and warehouses, hangars and hospitals. Major McCutcheon, as he was, nearly came unstuck in New Guinea, bringing home malaria that turned him a vivid yellow, but also a strong faith in dry construction and prefabrication, which he would loudly defend to a sceptical profession (“I have no time for the view that such an approach to architecture inevitably lowers our standards.”). ICI House – hugely simplified, for example, by its identical and infinitely interchangeable 3ft by 5ft enamelled glass panes – is in a way its monument.

Architecture in Australia was muted in the first postwar decade by a shortage of materials and of capital, but not by a dearth of ideas. Practitioners looked on enviously but excitedly at developments overseas – signature projects in New York like Wallace Harrison’s United Nations Secretariat in New York (1948-1952) and Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House (1950-52).

McCutcheon himself toured Scandinavia in 1948, borrowing ideas from its state-of-the-art hospital designs for his Footscray & District Hospital (1953). But he signified his embrace of modernism mainly by living in it, completing an ingenious “passive solar house” for his family in Mt Eliza, a rural enclave 30 miles from the city, at Christmas 1950.

‘Kackeraboite’, named after the local creek, was a long slim rectangle the width of a single room, north wall sheathed in glass, with huge sliding doors and banks of operable glass louvres split by a breezeway, sitting on an asphalted concrete slab that acted as a heat bank. Sun that penetrated to the back wall in winter did not hit the slab in summer, regulating internal temperatures. When McCutcheon’s contemporaries Robin Boyd, Frederick Romberg and Roy Grounds hosted Walter Gropius in May 1954, Kackeraboite was the venue of the reception – the Bauhaus sage wandered fascinated in the surrounding bushland, looking for koalas.

By that stage, McCutcheon had been drawn into one of Australia’s most rancorous aesthetic controversies, architecture’s counterpart of William Dobell’s Mr Joshua Smith winning the Archibald Prize. In January 1952, fire had gutted the great Gothic Revival pile of Wilson Hall at Melbourne University. Opinion was starkly divided about how to replace it.

The university council initially agreed to an exact rebuilding. But when it baulked at the expense, McCutcheon proposed a far cheaper modern alternative: a concrete-encased, steel-framed rectangular box with glass curtain walls and brick in-fill, and an interior of Swedish birch incorporating an intricate stained-glass screen designed by Douglas Annand and a chancellor’s throne fashioned by Grant Featherston.

The professoriat rebelled. But for a young colleague, Robert Dunster, it evinced McCutcheon’s leadership and urbanity. “Wilson Hall was the first building in Melbourne for decades that wasn’t simple or mundane, a house or a factory. And McCutcheon wanted perfection. He wanted a building to stand for a couple of hundred years. And he was able to inspire colleagues, the university and building workers with that idea.”

McCutcheon scorned flamboyance, but there was a flair to his purpose. The hour’s morning commute from Kackeraboite to BSM’s St Kilda Road studio was spent planning: by the time he arrived, trailing butter paper and cigarette smoke, he had laid out his daily objectives. Dunster recalls an afternoon standing at his boss’s desk awaiting attention. At length, McCutcheon looked up and said: “Three and a half minutes.” Then he resumed his activities for exactly that time before engaging again.

When not filling notebook after notebook with emphatic scrawlings, he would be rotating his pencil in his mouth. The tell-tale mark of pencil lead between his two front teeth was a firm in-joke. He abstained from alcohol – the sherry decanter on the sideboard at Kackeraboite was for the pleasure of visitors. But he was a peerless networker, especially over luncheon tables at Melbourne’s elite Savage Club, connected among politicians and planners, councillors and builders alike. In the 1930s, for example, he had designed the Ivanhoe mansions of the brothers Ernie and Frank Watts, who ran the city’s biggest construction company. In some respects, their partnership in ICI House was foreordained.

Sweet and lowdown

That, but maybe not much else. A walk round Melbourne’s central business district 60 years ago would have revealed a riot of bluestone, sandstone, brick and stucco, with the occasional flash of marble and granite – and, compared with today, very much more light. That was because Melbourne, like every Australian city bar Perth, and the vast majority of the world’s bigger metropolises, observed a height limit.

Melbourne’s, set in 1916, was 132 feet; Sydney allowed 150 feet. These horizontal slashes across Australian skies irked local architects, who argued that their various rationales, about fire safety and urban congestion, were outdated. But by some standards, the allowances were quite generous: London had only just begun tinkering with its 100-foot limit, while Paris (despite the Eiffel Tower) had ruled itself off at 65 feet. Nor did ICI Australia and New Zealand (ICIANZ), the antipodean arm of Britain’s sprawling Imperial Chemical Industries, seem a prime candidate to scour the sky.

ICIANZ straggled over eight sites in Melbourne, including a termite-ridden archive in an old chemical plant in Yarraville presided over by an aged ex-serviceman with a wooden leg; it had only just retired a logo featuring Britannia staring wistfully out to sea. Its parent, meanwhile, was a waddling, paternalistic bureaucracy, whose own London headquarters was a neoclassical low-rise faced in Portland stone and festooned with sculptures: Millbank was known among chafing middle managers as ‘Millstone’. ICI’s chairman, Sir Alexander Fleck, was a childless widower whose passions were hill climbing, tree felling and the Venerable Bede.

Something at ICIANZ, however, had recently shifted. A generational change in management had placed two younger men at the top: 50-year-old Ken Begg as chairman and 40-year-old Archibald Glenn as managing director, who wished to signify their ambitions with a new headquarters. In March 1952, the company had acquired a 2,340-square metre site at one of Melbourne’s highest points, Eastern Hill, where Lonsdale Street protrudes beyond the Hoddle Grid. Aligned with Parliament House and the Treasury Building, it seemed to cry out for a bold, proud building. And McCutcheon was eager to provide it.

McCutcheon’s first innovation was a cunning way to meet the spirit of the height limit while defying its letter, proposing a rectangular ‘tower-type building’ of 203 feet that would occupy only 41% of the block at ground level; the rest of the block would be allotted to a courtyard garden featuring public artwork of the kind with which he had enriched Wilson Hall. McCutcheon soothed the anxieties of the State Building Regulations Committee by persuading them that approval for ICI House need not prelude rampant development: section 214 of the Uniform Planning Regulations entitled the committee to modify rules without amending them. But nobody missed the implications when The Heraldforeshadowed the plans in May 1955: ‘New Skyline for City?’ read the headline.

The Metropolitan Fire Brigade was anxious. Not only was the height limit calibrated by the reach of their ladders and water jets, but the 360-degree view of Melbourne they enjoyed from their watchtower, only 200 yards from the site of ICI House, would be disrupted. To placate them, McCutcheon incorporated into his building elaborate fire protection measures, including a pioneering sprinkler system above the fifth floor. Others were also discomfited. The Eastern Hill block was not only home to the Salvation Army, but also several brothels. Not so much could be done in design terms here.

Fortunately, the atmosphere was one of excitement. Melbourne was about to sample something hitherto confined to the get-ahead United States. Robin Boyd, not only an adventurous architect but a popular arbiter of architectural taste, used his bully pulpit in The Herald to welcome the slashing of “the red tape which restricted Melbourne”. In the lineage from the Tower of Babel to the Eiffel Tower, here was a skyscraper worth the name: “This is a clean, precipitous tower in the best tradition. Elbow room is the first essential for effective skyscraping, and the ICI has that.” ICI had actually obtained even more elbow room than bargained for: having applied for permission to erect to 203 feet, it was approved to build to 230 feet thanks to the transposition of the ‘3’ and the ‘0’ by a Melbourne City Council typist.

Yet height was only the most obvious feature of McCutcheon’s design. Externally and internally, it was absolutely au courant. Without, McCutcheon clad ICI House in gleaming glass curtain walls to north and south that would flood the interior with natural light – a homage to New York’s UN Building and Lever House. Within, he offered vistas of uninterrupted space, a pioneering open plan, by quarantining the building’s services, such as lifts, plumbing and air conditioning, in a discrete 275-foot service tower, initially behind the core tower, then at right angles – a solution adopted in Chicago’s Inland Steel headquarters (1957) and San Francisco’s Crown Zellerbach Building (1959), classic glass curtain wall skyscrapers whose construction was concurrent with ICI House.

Perhaps the cleverest feature, meanwhile, was something the public never saw. Drawing on his experiences with the US Army, McCutcheon made extensive use of prefabrication and dry construction: floor units, beam encasements, concrete spandrels, panels of the west and east walls and the synthetic granite panels enclosing the service tower were all fabricated off site.

This, then, was a bold experiment. To be on the safe side, McCutcheon trialled several features, including the curtain wall detailing, service tower and reliance on prefabrication, in another smaller building in William Street, a headquarters for brickmaker Humes, whose construction was proceeding just in advance of ICI House. But it would be an underestimate to see Australia’s first skyscraper as a triumph of technology. It was a testament to McCutcheon’s personality, his calm authority, that Begg and Glenn bought into his vision so comprehensively. “It wasn’t ICI telling McCutcheon it wanted a glass box for its headquarters,” observes heritage architect Peter Lovell. “It was the other way around.”

The activity, moreover, formed part of a general building boom, unmatched in Australia since the 1880s. “It wasn’t simply about modernism,” says Philip Goad, deputy dean of architecture at Melbourne University and author of the history Bates Smart (2004). “It was about modernisation, a sense that the country now had to get its act together.” After two fallow decades, more than a score of tall office buildings would be completed in Melbourne between 1955 and 1960. It excited rivalry too. The final unveiling of plans in April 1956 was front page news in the Sydney Morning Herald, beneath the shocked headline: “Melbourne to have tallest building.” In due course height limits would stand no chance against the urges of oneupmanship.

BSM benefited: the firm was commissioned to design a second ICI House (1957), at 10 storeys, on Circular Quay, and handsome headquarters for Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance (1957-1960) in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Hobart. But Melbourne was the place to be. As EA Watts Pty Ltd began to manoeuvre the steel skeleton into place in May 1957, ICI had to erect a viewing platform for the benefit of “pavement superintendents” – the crowds, sometimes running into hundreds, who gathered round the site each day, including one man who would come every single morning, without exception, for nearly two years.

Watts’ workforce was itself a cross-section of the new postwar Australia: Australians and Englishmen alongside Italians, Greeks, Dutchmen, Americans, Yugoslavs, Poles and Egyptians, building their futures by making up to £50 a week. They worked speedily and harmoniously, completing the framing by Christmas, and the flooring systems within six further months. They paid a price too: three workers died, two in falls from height. Struan Gilfillan, then the most junior architect on the BSM team assisting McCutcheon, and today the last survivor, recalls the headlong rush: “Towards the end I was doing much of my work on the site. You’d design something one day, it would be built the next day, and you’d be inspecting it the day after.”

Though ICIANZ’s Begg and Glenn were interested clients, BSM exerted a control over the project that by modern lights seems quite extraordinary, even designing the custom-made furniture, manufactured by Collingwood’s Hunt Son & Oliver, with contributions from Grant Featherston. For browsing architectural eyes, there was much to see. The pilotis harked back to the Villa Savoye (1928) in Pouissy – the prototype modernist dwelling, designed by Le Corbusier. The landscaped courtyard garden, with its fountain sculpture by Gerald Lewers, was patterned by John Stevens on a similar feature of the Ministry of Education and Health (1936) in Rio – the original International Style office building, designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer under Le Corbusier’s sway.

The entranceway steps, which subtly slow the visitor’s transition from outside to inside, are a Japanese motif. The interior reliance on wood – warm and easy on the eye – shows Scandinavian influences. All of it encased in a characteristically American building typology for a British multinational client … and in an Australian city.

An Australian landmark

Height’s allure could be dark also. Fifty-eight-year-old PMG technician Ben Edwards had not been himself for some days. Since starting a course of blood pressure tablets, he had been forgetting things, feeling panicked. Could he be going out of his mind, he asked his GP. And though assured otherwise, he hesitated to go to work in Flinders Lane on 6 November 1958, before deciding he must.

At 1.45pm, having drawn his pay, he asked leave from his superior to sort out some money orders. Two hours later, he became the site’s fourth death, plummeting to the pavement of Albert Street from the roof of the nearly complete ICI House, passing by two window cleaners, who took him for a large bag. The next week his wife received two money orders, although no note, and the coroner returned an open verdict. (The 25-year-old investigating constable who deemed there “no suspicious circumstances” also played back pocket for St Kilda. Allan Jeans went on to be a sainted name in Australian rules – in Melbourne, you are never far from football).